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Thinking about a successful Software, Hardware or Document freedom Day.

About 27 years ago the GNU project released the Gnu General Public Licence
providing one of the first explicit framework of what a Free
Software really isi.

About 25 years ago a Finn
bragged on a small mailing list about his hobby "writing an
operating system" ii,
you probably know this under the GNU/Linux name iii

About 16 years ago Sun
Microsystem bought and released an early multi platform document
processing suite from a German Company called StarDivision and
released it under a free licence enabling you to edit and share
text, presentations, spreadsheets without depending of a single
vendor iv

About 14 years ago the
Mozilla foundation released it's first version of the Firefox
browser and pulled the web out of what could have been a
monopolistic grip v.

About the same time we saw an
explosion of Free "large packages", enabling you to deploy web
services, CMSs, ERPs, CRMs, e-Commerce, scientific computing, home
automation, etc... vi.

About
12 years ago we had the first Software Freedom Day with about 12
teams promoting free software not as a cornucopia of "free stuff
that you do not need to pay", but as tools for people who do not
really like to ask permission when they want to do something that is
none of somebody else's business.

So anybody who would even care the tiniest little bit had many opportunities to come in contact and learn about Free software, Open Documents and Open Hardware.

Nevertheless you will still meet, even among young educated people, even in very
technological countries, two types of people:

People who become confused when you speak about Free software, Linux, Libreoffice, Firefox, ... and although they are "indirect users of Linux" (most of the servers that run the services they are using
are Linux based), although they might have been using Libreoffice at
some point and most probably somebody installed Firefox on their
computer, they have no idea what you are talking about, because as
soon as somebody told them they just tuned out, seemed too much like
maths.

Other people have the eyes glazing over as soon as you mention Freedom in
relationship with technology, they "know", but do not want to be
bothered, probably because of "no politics today".

You
will also meet people who will gladly agree with you about how
important Free Software, Open Standards, Free Hardware is, but
nevertheless still use this "shiny shiny" fruity laptop and
mobile phone, because they "kind of care" but "it's just a
tool after all" and "shiny is good", or they will use the
"standard platform" because "it's just a tool, and it's
what they use at work" or "because you know: gaming trump
freedom".

This
is quite frustrating, but easily explained:

A rather large part of humanity is "authoritarian" it brings some
people comfort to delegate hard choices and policies to "the
authorities", it makes their lives easier and whatever happens
it's not their responsibility.

They
will use whatever is recommended by what they perceive as "the
authorities", a platform promoted by people who want you to make
your own decisions, and take responsibility for your life, will
never be popular with them.

So
unless you are "the strong man" ordering them to switch you will
not convince them.

Another
large part of humanity prefer the "brand" whatever the brand is,
because it's easier to buy some product and be "cool" by
association than to "do" something.

You
might get them through the "geek chic" fad, and wrap a Linux
laptop in a "Big Bang theory tee shirt", but as long as they
remain "users" and not "doers", it does not matter that
much.

And
most people are "busy" with their lives, and would rather ignore
inconvenient facts, especially if they can do very little about it,
bringing just the "problems" to people is not a solution,
Freedom has to be a solution to some issue you have.

Other
societal issues face the same problem, "global warming" ? Not
today please.

GMO
of it makes a large percentage of the population of emerging
countries redundant, forcing transformations that took generations
in the industrial world into a couple of years, and it might well be
bad for our health and destroy the soils, but hey palm oil is cheap...

And
I have trouble shaking off my brain the image of a couple of young
"penguin liberation front" activist preparing their
participation to an anti software patent action eating "branded"
fast food, it's just as hard as the memory of a "progressive"
organization firing staff to free up money to pay proprietary
software licences.

So it is still not "the year of the Linux desktop"

only about 1.5
to 2% of internet users are using a free platform (not counting the
Linux based Android platform).

If
we think of the Digital Freedom Foundation as a marketing tool to get
everybody to use Linux it is disappointing.

But if you acknowledge that what is important is to provide everybody
with a choice, and make sure that choosing a free platform is not
separating you from the rest of the world, then you should feel that
the efforts of the Free Software community were quite successful.

That is the difference between enabling and enforcing.

Or
seen another way there is a "country" of approximately 70 Million
people who all are using Free Software as their primary platform, and
can be assumed to care enough to go on developing new solutions to
make life in this "country" more interesting and successful.

And
we have the privilege of living in that "country", where we can
meet many interesting people of many different backgrounds, skill
sets, ideas, personal histories.

So,
of course, it is still important to:

Educate
young people and support initiatives to bring Free Software and Free
Hardware to young minds and help them imagine their future.

To
communicate with governments and standardization authorities to make
sure that free software platforms cannot be excluded.

As
is trying to work with the jurisdictional authorities to stop
monopolies from pushing proprietary software or services up your
throat because you need some hardware is a necessity.

And
letting monopolies control the multimedia highways and choose what
content is appropriate for you is a "big issue".

But
the "shotgun" approach of Free Software lobbying is obsolete,
anybody who has not yet heard of digital freedom issues either is a
citizen of the Andaman islands or really does not want to be
bothered, and the essence of freedom is that it cannot be imposed
against ones will.

What
we can and should focus on now is how to make the Digitally Free
successful, how to create more opportunities for people who want to
create, build, and share knowledge.

Therefore
here is my wish/laundry list/suggestion for the future
(Software|Hardware|Document) Freedom days

Goodbye
"install parties" it's been fun, but I will take a long time
forgetting a bunch of students scared to let go of their computers
with the pirated proprietary operating systems, because we might
install something new on them...

Goodbye
desktop software demo, because at this point you will either preach
to the choir, or demonstrate that it is not "exactly like that
other thing we are used to"...

But
:

Announcing
Free Software jobs to people who are really interested and already
using a free platform...

Announcing
your startup projects for which you would like same-minded partners.

Promoting
training, university courses enabling you to be better at what you
do.

Getting
together addressing specific Free Software/Hardware/Open Format
adverse policy issues, either global or specific to your geography,
and start setting up a game plan to address these issues.

Use
the opportunities to get in social contact without being dependent
on some "social network platform", teach about Mail, IRC,
Jabber, the ease of setting up one's own website and connecting
RSS feeds.

And of course: Have fun doing stuff.

Happy
Hacking !

i. Yes,
there are other licensing options, for example the "permissive"
licences, and it didn't address online services, and you might
find some earlier work, and the initial version was based on
economic models that might not work for you, and ... but you need to
start somewhere.

ii. Linus
Torvalds initial post has a great lesson for all software designer,
and really for all humans with big projects, he promised something
small, with not too much functionalities, and did not try to solve
hard problems too early. This enabled him to have something working,
and then get the traction to handle the "hard problems" (like
portability for example).

iii. Before
you grumble about "nah it's Linux", consider that the first
two big packages announced in this posting where Bash and Gcc both
being GNU products, so you could argue that now the operating system
should be either called Linux or Gnu/MIT/Libreoffice/<a bunch of
other important packages>/Linux or just Linux for short, but
acknowledging the seminal contribution of the GNU project to the
Linux environment does not diminish Linus Torvalds merit and is
educational. If we are lucky we can be "dwarves standing on the
shoulders of giants"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants#Attribution_and_meaning),
the alternative being "giants standing on the shoulders of
dwarves", and falling on our noses.

iv. Of
course the main issue was not to have a text processing platform,
there always were "other choices", but interoperability was and
is the key point, you do not want to impose to others to change
their editing platform just because you would like them to be able
to review your text. This made the dominant Office suite a trojan
horse for all the products of a single company.

v. For
those who were not around, or who do not remember, one browser from
a very large company who was able to leverage it's desktop
domination into online service ubiquity had about 90..95% of market
share in 2002, which in itself was not "a big deal", but it
enabled them to twist the standards and progressively create a "de
facto" standard for the web that would block other operating
systems, other document formats, create new monopolies on media
streaming, etc ...

vi. You
could try my game: find something that you could realistically want
to do, for which there is not an alternative under a Free licence,
well good heavy duty rocket schematics are hard to find, but then
the components are out of my tax bracket anyway.

About the author, Patrick Sinz

Patrick has been involved in Free Software since 1983, when he was curating the “kit du développeur Vincennois at the university of Paris 8” (distributed on 1/4” tapes). He is a board member of the AFUL (Association Francophone des utilisateurs de Logiciels Libre) and a founding member of SCLibre (Software y Cultura Libre) in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia).

His professional interests cover Free Software for eGovernment, 3D printing, complex infrastructures and the sane and efficient use of Big and/or Open Data, he organizes the Data Tuesday Barcelona networking event.

Outside of work, Patrick reads, cooks, bakes, sculpts, listen to live music and can be found where good food meets decent beverages, he has two fast growing children.